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Action 33

Be realistic in your reasoning

We often find thoughts like these going around in our heads:
"The buses are always late" or "She must be annoyed with me" or
"I'll never be any good at my job". Well science has shown that the
beliefs we have about why things happen to us can affect our
happiness and our health. [1][2] But the good news is that we can
learn to challenge this negative self-talk.

Martin Seligman and his colleagues have shown that the way we see the causes of events that happen in our lives has a big impact on our well-being. When bad things happen, if we have an 'optimistic explanatory style' we're less likely to give up easily, more resilient to depression, more likely to perform better at challenging work and have better physical health than people with a more 'pessimistic explanatory style'. [1][2] This isn't because fewer bad things happen to us, but the way we explain these things to ourselves is different.

When things go wrong, if we have a pessimistic style we see it as all our own fault (me); that things like this will always go wrong and never be any different (always); and that its not just in this one area or part of our lives that this thing goes wrong, but the other parts too (everything).

On the other hand, if we have an optimistic style we tend to think that the reasons were outside of ourselves (not me); that the problem was just limited to now (not always); and only affect the one area that the problem occurred in (not everything). [2]

It isn't a question of being blindly optimistic in our explanations or failing to see how we contribute to problems. It's about becoming more aware of our natural style and being able to challenge ourselves if our explanations are unhelpful. A pessimistic style can be as unrealistic as an overly optimistic one and it certainly doesn't help us to be happy. So it's about being a realistic optimist. Find out how below.

Example 3: You get something wrong at work. Here the optimistic style might say: "I struggle with doing that stock report" whereas the pessimistic style might decide: "I'll never be any good at my job".